Popularity of singles on the most popular Taylor Swift album, “Lover”

The Point of View (POV) refers to the narrative perspective used in the lyrics. Categories of POV: First-Person POV (37.8%): The narrator speaks from a personal perspective, often using “I,” “me,” or “we.” Second-Person POV (37.8%): The narrator directly addresses the listener or another person with “you” or “your.” Third-Person POV (21%): The narrator describes events or characters from an external perspective, using “he,” “she,” or “they.” Abstract/No Clear POV (3.4%): Lyrics are metaphorical, symbolic, or lack a definitive narrative perspective.

From this we can see that Taylor Swift Songs are indeed dominated by the personal tone: the majority of the songs are written about personal experiences or directed toward a concrete you

After initial discovery of themes, I categorised Taylor Songs into the following themes: 1. Personal Love and Romance: Encompasses both romantic beginnings and enduring connections. 2. Personal Heartbreak and Vulnerability: Covers themes of loss, healing, and self-reflection post-breakup. 3. Empowerment and Growth: A focus on resilience, confidence, and rising above adversity. 4. Social and Cultural Commentary: Reflecting on societal issues, fame, and personal criticism. Friendship and Loyalty could be introduced as its own category to emphasize these unique, non-romantic relationships

As most songs had subthemes, I introduced Primary fit and secondary fit. This allowed a more nuanced mapping of the present themes.

Danceability: This measures how suitable a track is for dancing based on a mix of musical elements such as tempo, rhythm stability and overall regularity. Reputation and lover have the highest dancebility scores.

Energy: Energy represents the intensity and activity of a track, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. High-energy tracks are typically fast, loud, and dynamic. Reputation has the highest energy of Taylor’s albums.

Tempo: Tempo indicates the speed of a track, measured in beats per minute (BPM). Speak now has the highest average tempo of the albums.

Acousticness: Acousticness is a confidence score (0.0 to 1.0) that indicates whether a track is acoustic. A score of 1.0 reflects high confidence that the track is acoustic, while lower scores suggest it is more electronic or produced.

Valence: Valence measures the emotional tone of a track. Tracks with high valence sound cheerful, happy.Besides the holiday collection, red and lover have the highest average valence.

As we can see, the different point of views of the songs all have very similar popularity. We can assume that the point of view from which a Taylow Swift song is written does not have a major effect on the tracks popularity.

Popularity of an album as the strongest (negative) correlation with the acoustic nature of the album, followed by the energy of the album. Based on the correlation, looks like that when we look at the aggregated musical features of the albums the ones that are more energetic and do not have an acoustic nature are preferred amongst Spotify listeners.

I selected for the subject of visualisation the “personal romantic stories” theme category as it is present in all observed albums. We can see here that although there is an outlier in the presence of “the tortured poets department”, we can observe a strong correlation between the popularity of an album and how much of it is focusing on the beauties of the singer’s romantic entanglments.